Revoking tasks works by sending a broadcast message to all the workers, the workers then keep a list of revoked tasks in memory. When a worker starts up it will synchronize revoked tasks with other workers in the cluster.

The list of revoked tasks is in-memory so if all workers restart the list of revoked ids will also vanish. If you want to preserve this list between restarts you need to specify a file for these to be stored in by using the –statedb argument to celery worker.